RE: A suggestion from the public

Toby -

Telling people that they should have spoken up 10+ years ago... it's not a
legitimate answer. Many of them were not using HTML then. And, from what I
hear, the HTML 4 process wasn't exactly one which encouraged the level of
public input that HTML 5 does.

What they are asking for is for HTML 5 to provide mechanisms to make a
simple document that is considered "current" (ie: HTML 5), "valid", and
"conforming".

Also note, that if DOCTYPE were not a mere "magic talisman", then this
wouldn't be needed, DOCTYPE would do what they want. But until DOCTYPE
actually works that way, and browsers support more than just "quirks" and
"standards" modes, and actually put in parsers for a zillion older versions
of HTML (unlikely), then I do think that there is validity to the need for a
simplified HTML.

Do I think we need a return to <font> and table based layouts? Not really,
those days were a mess! Do I think that CSS and such make a lot of sense?
Yup. But I also see the point of view of people who want something easy to
work with. HTML 4 and HTML 5 have significantly raised the cost of entry
into basic document creation.

J.Ja

-----Original Message-----
From: Toby Inkster [mailto:tai@g5n.co.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 5:59 AM
To: Justin James
Cc: 'Tab Atkins Jr.'; public-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: A suggestion from the public

On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 00:00 -0400, Justin James wrote:

> I really think that answer completely ignores the fundamental issue
> that these folks have. To make it clear, they are extremely angry that
> the *current* HTML efforts ignore this kind of work. They want a way
> to do things in a valid, conforming, and "approved" fashion in a
> current standard, that does not require all sorts of hoops to jump
> through.

Then this is perhaps an issue they should have raise while it was still
being decided in the mid-1990s. Presentational HTML was deprecated by
the HTML 4.0 recommendation, finalised over 11.5 years ago.

HTML 3.2, HTML 4.0 Transitional, HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0
Transitional all include support for presentational elements and
attributes, and will continue to work as expected for the foreseeable
future.

If these people of whom you speak want to continue to follow their
current practices, and are not interested in changing their style of
markup, why would they want to learn a whole new version of HTML (HTML5)
anyway?

-- 
Toby A Inkster
<mailto:mail@tobyinkster.co.uk>
<http://tobyinkster.co.uk>

Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 20:52:53 UTC